Welcome to BubbleIdeas API wiki page. Wanna code something?

We will soon roll out the API/RDF wiki!

What's an API?

The acronym "API" stands for "Application Programming Interface". An API is just a defined way for a program to accomplish a task, usually retrieving or modifying data. API Programs talk to the BubbleIdeas API over HTTP, the same protocol that your browser uses to visit and interact with web pages. In BubbleIdeas, we provide an API method for just about every feature you can see on a communty that is based on our application. Programmers can use the API to make applications, websites, widgets, and other projects that interact with a community. What's best is that an application made for one community is automatically available for any other community elsewhere. You just need to pass a new "API Key" into your app and get it started at different places.

How do I use the BubbleIdeas API?

If you want your application to do the sort of things a community on our application can do, check out the Ruby based REST API documentation. To search public data/ideas/updates programmatically, check out the API documentation as well. You don't need to write all the code to do the talking with the BubbleIdeas API. Nice developers have shared several open source libraries of code that take care of that. Just you wait if you want to see examples of complete, working API projects here. If you wish to contribute immediately or help give shape to API standards do chime your thoughts on to Community

Will there be any Approval Process for applications under Open Development?

Essentially no. However, we recommend developers to stick to "ethical" and "acceptable" use where both these terms are governed by collective responsibilty & respect towards the internet, offline space, blogs, media, people, groups or even individuals. As a pre-cursor developers on BubbleIdeas API are recommended to use OAuth to perform authentication with the API. When applications use OAuth, BubbleIdeas will automatically know the source of data and it will accordingly append source attribution (from "[MyApp]") to the respective ideation forum. Once your application is registered to recieve a source parameter, and OAuth authentication is implemented we will automatically include your application as the source for any ideas sent from your application. To maintain sanity applications without OAuth source parameters are not accepted.

Will there be an upper rate-limit for hits?

Yep! Beyond a rate-limit on every community there will an overall upper limit for your app with all communities taken together. To access higher higher hit-rates/hour you will be prompted for a 'whitelist' approval and this will keep you going. Keep a watch on this page to learn more on this. If you wish to participate in design level of API standards, join us on the developer community. Very soon we will role out the API wiki and then we can have more focussed discussion on everything related to Minimum API Standards (MAS)